Thought I'd answer an e-mail in public here: I said in an earlier post that, on the Internet, when someone says, "I've been flooded with messages," it means three or four e-mails. (If they say, "I've been flooded with messages that agree with my position," it means two.) Someone wrote to ask, "Can you give ONE concrete example?"
Well, it's not exactly on the Internet and it's not concrete…but I used to run a couple of phone-up bulletin boards, and I don't see why the mindset would have evolved. Most bulletin boards ran on software that showed the System Operator all sorts of user data that was invisible to most callers. For instance, on one of the systems I set up, when you posted a public message and I read it, I also saw a little window that told me when you'd last called, how many times you'd called, how many private e-mails you had in your mailbox, etc., and also how many callers the system had had in the last few hours. (This was not me snooping; the software automatically displayed this stuff.) I couldn't help but notice that it was not uncommon for John Doe to post a message at, say, 1:00, then at 3:30, he'd call back in and post, "My mailbox is flooded with messages agreeing with me" — only it wasn't. I knew, but never said aloud, that in those 2.5 hours, he'd only received one e-mail. Some flood.
Once, a fellow posted a message attacking someone at Noon, logged off and then I had to take the system off-line for some maintenance work. I actually sat there at the computer, waiting for the guy to finish and disconnect, before I shut it down. It was down around three hours and, when I put it back up, this same guy was the first caller to get in. He immediately posted one of those, "I'm being swamped with support" messages even though absolutely no one (including me) had read his 12:00 posting, let alone responded to it.
This kind of thing happened often enough for me to assume it's just human nature and probably has not changed. I've certainly seen enough newsgroup or chat board postings on the Internet that struck me as suspicious in this regard. But then, I'm also skeptical when a public figure says they've been inundated with positive paper mail. My own experiences, working in comic books and TV, have yielded numerous examples of folks grotesquely exaggerating their fan mail — or of protesters grossly overstating how many complaints they delivered to someone. (Remember when CBS dumped Pee-Wee Herman's show and his fans claimed the network was "waist-deep" with letters of protest? CBS received something like six letters. Imagine the exaggerations possible with e-mail, the existence of which is even harder to verify than physical letters.)
So you may not consider this "concrete" but that's why I believe what I believe. And most of you do, too. Why, I've received thousands of e-mails agreeing with me…